But the Greatest of These
by mon-petit-pois
Summary: "The line is long and her patience short. She waits." A coffee shop AU with an unusual twist.


_For Nicole_ _(mcgeekle),_ my beautiful wonderful amazing friend. Your friendship means so much to me. I feel like I've known you forever; that we've been crying and laughing and yelling and exchanging fic for eons. I really hope you enjoy this piece (friendly reminder that when you sent me the prompt back in July and I went running with it you said, and I quote, "IF YOU DON'T WRITE THIS I WILL DIE"—and it's my friend duty to make sure you don't die right?). So here we are! Enjoy, and have the very happiest of birthdays, you senior citizen :)

[Also, a huge huge _huge_ thank you to Tatiana (born30) for being an all around amazing friend/coach/advice-giver/soundingboard for this fic. You've put up with a lot in the past few weeks and I can't thank you enough!]

Enjoy!

* * *

—

"We do not suffer by accident."

 _Jane Austen_

—

 _It is not raining when she pulls up to the coffee shop. She will remember that detail._

 _For seven days she drove in a downpour, huge droplets sliding down the windshield so she could almost not see the hood of the car. She wondered idly so many times what would happen if she crashed. But today, it does not rain. There were clear skies over the Beltway as she circled the city._

 _She lived here once, she muses as she takes the keys from the ignition. Six months? A year? It was too long ago to remember. She had fled so quickly, barely even staying to sit Shiva._

 _She thinks of Tali in this city, and the thoughts are tinged a green shade of black. The bright sun saps energy from her body as she climbs out of the car—agile limbs, tired limbs. A paradox, in and of herself._

 _On the sidewalk she stands straight, her shoulders slumped._

…

She was eight years old when her mother revealed to her the ways of their world. They sat at an outdoor café on a Sunday afternoon; their usual table, surrounded by bags of market groceries. Rivka sipped at jasmine tea and Ziva, her legs dangling over the edge of the chair, at fresh orange juice. Little feet swung back and forth. Back and forth. The impatience of a child. Baby Tali fussed in her mother's arms, hungry; Rivka quieted her with her breast.

They watched people—as they always did, yes, but today was different. Today the passersby became examples in a mother's lesson to a daughter, living cases with which to explain reality.

 _See those women over there by the bookstore, Zivaleh? They look quite alike, do they not? Like twins, almost. They passed by here a few minutes ago, did you hear how they called one another?_

Mother and daughter, Rivka explained. Ziva frowned and fidgeted, sitting on her hands.

Her _ima_ unfolded the world with a mouth creased on both ends and eyes winged by crows' feet. Her words made sense of so many things—how a mother and daughter could walk side by side virtually indistinguishable, how wrinkles could curse the face of a son before a father; why the woman who sold flowers at the market had a face as flawless as Ziva always remembered, why the most youthful of faces sometimes held the most tired eyes.

And how no one had batted an eyelash when, a week earlier, a too-young body had flattened with a sickening _thud_ on the sidewalk next to their apartment building; why pity but not despair hung low over the onlookers as men in blue lifted red and crooked limbs onto a stretcher. Her mother had told her that the boy was going to the hospital so the doctors could save him, but Ziva knew it was a lie. Perhaps that was how they'd ended up here, with the truth cracked open and spilled out for her to absorb.

Ziva caught on quickly. ( _A sharp little girl,_ she'd heard her father say once; it was months and months ago, but she had not forgotten.) The pieces fell into place and she nodded her wide-eyed understanding. Her legs stopped swinging. She was still a decade removed, yet she felt the weight.

There was one question, however…

"How old are you, _Ima_?"

Rivka took the last sip of her tea and patted her oldest daughter's hand. "A question for another time."

It was nice out, so they walked home. Rivka held one daughter to her chest and the other's hand close to her side. The whole way home, Ziva scanned the faces on the sidewalks, in the storefronts, in passing cars. She looked for _him_ , but found only foreign faces that she no longer trusted would tell her the truth.

…

 _She enjoys tea now, like her mother. Jasmine. She opens the door to the shop and the scent hits her like a wall, but it smells of her father's study—he preferred coffee._

…

She was fourteen years old when the training began. After school, before school; she saw the sunrise more days than she could count. She became more familiar with her sparring partners than her new classmates, with the paint on the bottom of an Olympic swimming pool than the walls of her own bedroom.

Sometimes, she would ask to go out. The first time she asked, it was a birthday party. A boy named Shmuel. _How many laps did you swim this morning?_ She answered her father, six, and he cocked a greying eyebrow and said he'd asked for seven. _You will go to parties when you learn to obey your father._

The second time she asked, months later, it was a sleepover. _Have you finished your homework?_ She answered that she had nothing due until Monday. _You will waste time with your friends only after you finish your schoolwork._

The third time she asked, it was a school dance. She'd gone with Tali to a shop down the street and bought a beautiful blue dress. _Your regimen?_ Done, she answered. _Homework?_ Done, she answered. He could not object then, so he let her go, but the look of disappointment on his face when she returned at midnight turned her stomach upside down with shame for days afterward.

She stopped asking.

It was a few nights after the dance that she heard her parents arguing through her bedroom wall.

"You do not think I see what you aim to do?" Only Rivka would dare to challenge her father.

"And what is that?"

"You are isolating her! You _want_ her to be like this forever. Your perfect soldier."

"I only want what is best for her." Her father's voice was calm amidst the storm of anger. Stoic.

"That is a lie. You see her only as a weapon to be honed and hidden away."

"Mossad will teach her things that will prepare her for life."

"You do not want to prepare her for life! You want to keep her from it, for as long as possible. What kind of life can she have at Mossad?"

"A long and impactful one."

"An _empty one!_ "

She stopped listening after that, for she could not decide whose side she was on.

…

She was sixteen years old when her brother died. The Davids gathered around his graveside—a father, two half-sisters and a mother that had never been his. Family friends, too. There was the distinct murmuring going around of _too young, what a tragedy, far too young._ A few months over eighteen.A car accident in Edinburgh, her father had told her. _How awful. I hear he wanted to be a doctor._ Ziva knew the truth, but she did not correct them.

Tali clung to her as the coffin lowered into the earth amidst floating, prayerful voices. Cantillation. The Kaddish _. Yisgadal v'yiskadash sh'mei rabbaw…_ Ari had confided in her one night years ago that he did not believe in God. She had not understood—in a world where there was someone for everyone, mustn't a higher power exist? She could not understand his pessimism. His disillusion.

He was dead now, though. Wherever he was, he knew the truth. Under her breath, she said the prayer for him. _B'allmaw dee v'raw chir'usei..._ It was more a comfort for the living, anyhow.

…

 _There is a little bell attached to the door. It proclaims her entrance. There are many inside the café, but no one looks up._

…

She was seventeen years old when she became a soldier. She donned the uniform with pride; the green-khaki cloth, scuffed combat boots, heavy vest and helmet became one with her skin. The assault rifle fit, comfortable and familiar, in her hands. Born for this.

Eli called her after she finished basic training. _Child's play,_ she told him. He sounded proud.

The Israeli Defense Force was as freeing as it was restrictive. Where there were rules and orders there was also companionship. No more late nights and early mornings training—instead, new faces that wanted to have fun as much as serve their country. In combat they were serious, stoic and order-driven with their rifles in hand. But in the barracks they laughed rowdy laughs with a straight flush wedged between their fingers. Ziva learned to play poker, and tried her first cigarette.

They were good people, her fellow soldiers. Most looked to be her age, filling out their required service, but some had old eyes and bodies littered with scars. She knew not to ask about them—how they got them, how long ago, which war.

She remembered the boy, all those years ago, who had ended crumpled on the sidewalk below her bedroom window. A perfect body, broken. She wondered how long he had struggled, before…

…

She had been in the IDF two months and a day when it happened to her. It was unceremonious, marked only by watch hands that read 0847. The twelfth of November. The date and time on her birth certificate, all the same but the year.

She turned eighteen and her body came to a standstill, as she'd always heard it would. As she knew it would, logically. But somehow, it was different when it happened to her.

The hands on her watch moved forward but she felt as if she'd been stopped in her tracks, paused in time. Frozen. For someone who loved to keep moving, it was a disorienting and unpleasant sensation.

Her family called that night. Well, Tali and her mother called.

"So, can you tell? Have you…?"

"I must not have found him yet, Tali."

"Well that's okay. You'll find each other eventually. And this way, you don't have to think back and wonder who it was. Now when you meet him… you'll know."

Her sister's optimism fell flat in Ziva's heart. Tali had always been a romantic, fascinated with the concept, but Ziva's world was made of loaded guns and IEDs and orders and duty. She had no room for thoughts of soulmates.

She was only eighteen. She had all the time in the world.

…

Her soul had lived only twenty years when she celebrated her birthday for the last time. It was that February that her mother joined her brother. She'd been walking home from the market, crossing the same intersections she crossed every week. Witnesses said it was a drunk driver. _It… it just happened so fast._ A lifeless body surrounded by blood and bruised groceries in the middle of the street. A hit-and-run, the news reported.

Ari and her mother were buried in the same plot though they shared no blood. Again, the Kaddish. Again, torn garments, hushed whispers and quiet sobs. Again, Tali clinging to her side. They bury their mother.

It was a closed casket, but Ziva could see her face. Wrinkles from laughter and worry, face framed with thick brown and strands of grey. Too soon, surely, and Ziva mourned—but a part of her she did not quite yet understand twisted with a strange sort of longing.

She realized, as they walked away from the grave to begin Shiva, that she'd forgotten to ask her mother how many years her soul had. _A question for another time,_ Rivka had replied so long ago. Her body in the coffin showed only forty-two, but appearances lied. Perhaps her father knew how many years.

It was that day, the day they put her mother in the ground, that Ziva stopped counting her own.

…

 _The line is long and her patience short. She waits._

…

From the military to Mossad.

It was a homecoming of sorts—more to her father than to Tel Aviv. She became who she had been trained to be. The Kidon Unit had never had an officer so new to the agency, especially not a woman, but in truth she was not new to Mossad. She'd been Mossad since she was a teenager; it came with the territory of being her father's daughter.

She got to travel. Cairo, Sarajevo, Paris, Prague. So many of her fellow discharged soldiers did the same—the paths of romantics, those who spent years searching. Her eyes strained for something different than theirs, though. She looked for the faces not of other halves but of those in manila folders stamped _Top Secret._ Her old friends thought of love, and Ziva of empty seduction.

She killed. As the light died behind their eyes, she would always wonder how many years they had wandered this earth.

And for some, she wondered if she wasn't a deliverer of mercy.

…

She was the sharp end of the spear, her father said. Every mission honed her skills, strengthened her muscles, toned her body. Even after years there was no decline—three, five, ten passed and she was as young and beautiful as the day the clock struck 0847. _An invaluable asset._ She collected her father's praise and filed it away neatly inside herself. She pushed on.

…

 _There is a little boy at the table by the window, and he waits for his mother to return with his juice. His nose is pressed to the glass as he looks out at the bustling sidewalk. She can see his wide-eyed fascination reflected on the surface and she wants to tell him something, but she does not know what._

 _In line, she shifts her weight. Folds her arms. Waiting._

…

She numbered the years not in her own age but her sister's, and at only twenty-three Tali's soul began to move forward again in time. Her body, five years dormant, lurched awake, and it was 0300 in Moscow when Ziva got the news.

He was a boy named Aaron. An American, a tenor in the Washington National Opera. Tali's internship at the Kennedy Center became a paid position; a relationship became an engagement which became wedding plans with alarming speed. But what could Ziva expect, from a romantic such as her sister?

Ziva flew out to celebrate the happy occasion. Happy, she told herself, and for the few days of preparations and rehearsals and festivities it worked. Tali's dress was white and her smile whiter. The light and love in her eyes were imprinted behind Ziva's.

 _Happy, she told herself._

But that night Tali's plane took off, headed for some remote honeymoon island, and something dark that had been threatening Ziva since Moscow settled upon her. She closed her eyes and saw Tali, and wondered if those weren't wrinkles she already saw forming around her little sister's smiling mouth.

There was nothing as base as that kind of selfishness—that kind of jealousy, that kind of fear—but she could not banish it.

In the hotel elevator that night was a man in a suit. Familiar. She had seen him from afar at the reception. Something clicked.

 _You remember Mrs. Rivkin, Zivaleh? She told me at tea last week that her son is serving with you…_

"Ziva," he nodded. Button number five lit up under his fingertip.

"Michael." A pity her mother wasn't here, Ziva mused. Surely she would have taken the opportunity to try to set the two of them up again. "Did you enjoy the wedding?"

"I did. Tali looks beautiful. She has really grown up."

A distant answer, "Yes."

"You look beautiful, too. It's been a long time since I saw you in anything but an IDF uniform."

And that was all it took. By the time the elevator doors slid open on the fifth floor she had him pressed up against the railing. Chest on chest, mouth on mouth, her fingers in his hair, tugging fiercely.

They ended up in his room, on his bed, without another word, her hands searching under his button-up shirt for what she desperately craved. He did not protest. She shed her bridesmaid's dress and let him search her, too. Sweat and wild moans, skin slick on scarred skin. She panted heavily, as if to breathe into him her fear and loneliness so they could share the weight.

Morning came with sunlight filtering through the curtains and landing on her scratched back. She extricated her bare body, empty body, from the sheets to leave before he woke.

She could not remember if it had felt good, only that for a few short moments she could not feel reality.

She stood in front of a mirror as she put back on the crumpled dress. There were bruises darkening her stomach, thighs, collarbone. Still, she wanted it again. Craved more. Fiercely.

They had the same flight back, but they did not say a word. When they landed in Tel Aviv she took him to her apartment; they barely made it through the door. The next morning she woke alone, with seven more bruises to add to the running tally of false comfort.

…

The tally grew. Sometimes it was not Michael—sometimes it was men from her unit, sometimes men from random bars. Mostly, though, it was Michael. He worked for Mossad too, she found out. Her father, now the Director, was very fond of him. She wondered if Eli knew his favorite agent would often take his daughter home, where she let him fuck her wordlessly in the dead of night. Would he even care?

Once, under the cover of darkness, she asked Michael: "Do you believe in soulmates?"

His answer was a scoff, and they never discussed it again.

It went like this for a long time. It became habit. Familiar. She made occasional flights to America to visit her sister whose belly, for a while, seemed to swell every few years with a new life. Every visit Tali's hair was straighter, her face fuller, her body sturdier. Maternal-like. Ziva always greeted the blossoming family with a smile and held her nieces in teenage arms.

She would go straight to Michael's upon her return where they would fall together on his bed. Roughly, sadly, painfully.

It was a poor substitute.

…

She lost Michael and her father in the same year—the first to a stray bullet, the second to a heart attack. Neither came as a surprise.

She mourned each blue and white draped coffin with dry eyes, and after both funerals she paused at the grave of her mother. Tali gripped her hand. They laid down flowers.

Her sister's palms had already begun to wrinkle.

…

 _Four people ahead of her now. At the counter a man takes a cup and takes a sip and his face twists in disgust, then anger. He yells, and the boy at the window turns and the barista turns red. It goes on, and she wonders on the things that we decide are worth something. The things that matter._

…

She heard the stories, of course. As isolated as she was, she could not avoid them. How could she, after all, when it was in every newspaper, book, movie, and folktale, in some form or another? It was the backstory to every supervillain, asylum patient, and broken body flattened on the sidewalk, real or fictional. It was the tragic trope of their world—those who searched and searched, but never found.

Tali did not like these stories. When she was old enough they'd read them at night in their shared bed. They were novels, school assignments more often than not. So many plots featured those with ancient eyes and youthful skin, and their inevitable fall from that rooftop of centuries-long suffering. On the blood-spattered sidewalk, they found either madness or welcome death.

Tali was a romantic from the start, and she refused to read those books. But once she was asleep Ziva would steal away to the bathroom and glue herself to the pages. She read of broken love stories and love stories that never were and the tales of those left so terribly behind. She read of island insane asylums and immortal beings turned to monsters, and of a black market for mercy killing that in due time she would discover to be very much real. It was a morbid fascination.

Decades later, Ziva remembered and told herself she was different from them. Told herself, told herself, told herself.

…

She replaced Michael with a man called Malachi. A family friend, a Mossad officer, a man with intense eyes and a strong sense of duty. She knew him well—he had been her partner in the Kidon Unit for more years than she cared to count. In their binary world he belonged strictly in the category of the hedonists, like so many in Mossad.

Between the sheets was the usual drill. Sometimes gentle, sometimes rough, but that did not matter. It always ended the same. Taut, fit bodies pressed sweaty against one another. Skin on skin, scars on scars. As always, she briefly forgot the world. Briefly.

…

 _The bell at the door rings again, and she does not turn around to look._

…

She did not know how many years passed before she lost him, too. She knew only that Tali's youngest daughter, had she been born in Israel, would be old enough to join the IDF, and that Malachi was gone.

His fate, however, was not Michael's.

They were on a mission in Kosovo when it happened. On a street corner he stopped in his tracks, paralyzed, and stared across the intersection. A store front, a bustling sidewalk— one woman not moving. She had blonde hair and wide blue eyes. Staring back. His body lurched forward, moving through the street and once again through time.

Ziva knew the rest. She walked back to the hotel alone and had a pen and paper ready for Malachi's resignation letter when he returned.

…

He invited her to the wedding, but she did not go. The cream-colored cardstock decorated with sweeping calligraphy found a home in the garbage. She would not be able to deal with the smile on his face, the glowing happiness of a man transformed.

She had found solidarity in him, before. It was a strange kind of betrayal.

Malachi's absence left a hole that she filled with bitterness, and she vowed to never again get so close. She was still an addict, but now her fix of physical release came from a vast assortment of men. They came from random bars around the world—in Buenos Aires, Casablanca, Amsterdam, Kiev. Sometimes they didn't even have a language in common. After she completed the mission, she would put on a tiny cocktail dress and four-inch heels and encourage one thing to lead to another. She was always gone before they woke.

She met a lot of men on those missions—every kind of man, from every kind of place the world had to offer. With each new face her faith faded. Every day that passed with her body still frozen in time cemented the notion that her existence was nothing more than a cruel joke. That, for one reason or another, she had not been given a soulmate.

And with this realization, of course, came the pointlessness of it all.

Sometimes she wondered why she was still in Mossad. Sometimes she wondered, but though she hid from the answer she knew it. She had always known it…

For Mossad was all she had that would not leave.

…

Her life, she realized as she disembarked the plane at Dulles, was marked not by years but by tragedies.

The doctors told them—an elderly couple, three middle-aged daughters, and a woman with the face of a teenager—that it was severe congestive heart failure. Ran in the family, they all knew. That day, Ziva learned that her sister's body was seventy-four years old and dying.

Tali's hands were frail, her hair grey, her face wrinkled and pale like bed sheets, but her eyes were brave.

Ziva's eyes were older, and they were not brave.

…

She took a leave of absence from Mossad and moved in with Tali and Aaron. Able-bodied, she was of great help to them both. They did not know how long Tali had left, but Ziva planned to spend it all with her.

She refused to think of what came after.

Tali's children had children, now, and most looked to be nearly Ziva's age. They visited their grandmother frequently and Ziva grew fond of them. There was one in particular.

She remembered a phone call, years and years ago, from Tali's youngest daughter. _I named her after you, Aunt Ziva._ Now the child was seventeen. Nearly there.

Little Ziva looked just like her great-aunt, so much so that Tali, with her aging eyes, had trouble telling them apart. The Namesake wondered if the child would outlive her, and prayed that would not be the case. She prayed that the girl had not inherited her curse.

Ziva could not wish this on anyone.

…

Tali died.

There was a funeral. A graveside service. A headstone with the names of her mother, father, brother, and now sister. She was the last.

 _Yisgadal v'yiskadash sh'mei rabbaw…_

Her beloved sister lay wrinkled and brittle in a coffin, and Ziva grieved, her shaking body looking barely older than it had at the graveside of her brother. He had been the first of them to go.

 _B'allmaw dee v'raw chir'usei..._

Her eyes were too hardened for tears, but there were other ways to grieve.

…

They wanted her to stay in Washington. Aaron, her nieces, Little Ziva and the others. She refused without thinking. Tali was buried one day and she was back at Mossad the next.

She had been around so long that she'd become a living legend. She wanted to pick her own missions, and they let her. Only the most dangerous was good enough for her. Only the most high-profile targets, the most impossible of circumstances. She refused partners; she worked alone now. She heeded no warnings—in fact, they only urged her on.

She'd jumped futilely in front of four bullets before Saleem Ulman's file found its way into her hands.

…

There was a boat. It made its course from Aqaba through the Red Sea towards the Horn of Africa. Many people died before it arrived in Mogadishu, but Ziva was not one of them.

She arrived in Saleem's camp with her hands clasped around burning metal and her belt heavy with knives for throwing, slicing, stabbing. For a while she was winning. She was a war-hardened machine. She killed so many men.

It took only one blow to the head to bring her crashing to the ground. She fired her weapon instinctively and the bullet buried itself in a clay wall. A man had an AK47 pressed against her skull, and for a moment she believed…

She closed her eyes and welcomed it. Behind the red-seared darkness of her eyelids she could feel every weary bone; she'd broken almost all of them at some point along the way. They had healed, but inside she was the boy on the sidewalk below her bedroom window. She waited only for the blood, and the final release. She waited. Waited, always waited.

And like always, it never came.

Someone barked an order. Instead of a bullet was the butt of the gun—and there was black, but not the black she craved.

…

It was not the first time she had been captured—it was not even her first encounter with torture. But it was the first time she did not follow the rules.

Composure, Mossad had taught. Those who trained her preached silence and dignity even in blinding agony. Show no pain, no anger, _nothing._ But she was too old for this. She was too tired for these games.

They came in never-ending waves. The door creaked open to young faces and young eyes glinting with the reflections of the blades they wielded—army knives, carving knives, machetes; some of the smaller ones she recognized as her own. They brought chains sometimes, whips others. Nothing she hadn't suffered through before, and suffered quietly.

She felt more, though, than the pain they inflicted. She felt more than the humiliation, the violation, the horror. There was a lifetime—a _lifetime—_ of grief and loneliness in her bones, and it compounded.

She screamed as they cut dually into her adolescent skin and her ancient soul. She gave gargled cries as they drained the blood from her veins and she watched as it formed puddles on the sandy concrete. They stripped her and bruised her in the same places Michael Rivkin had, and she roared her sadness and fury.

They turned her to rubble. Ruins.

When they left her alone in a pool of her own blood she had nothing to do but reflect. She closed her eyes to see her existence stretched behind her. Decades. She did not care to count them. Within their bounds she saw only a lifetime of death. Her legacy.

And now she was to die alone in the desert. Her concave stomach twisted as she mourned, suddenly, for her existence… And most surprisingly, for its end.

Eventually, she had no more screams, and they no more questions. They sliced, tore, ripped her apart for sport after that, but she felt it drawing to a close.

…

 _There is one person in front of her now. Oh, she has waited so long._

…

It was mere happenstance, really. Luck, if you could call it that.

They descended on the camp in a hailstorm of bullets—a small group of men, doing what she craved so terribly. In the dead of night they brought gunfire like a fireworks display and her captors fell, one by one by one. Or so they told her later. She could not lift her head from the concrete, but she heard it all.

They yelled profanity in the accent of her dead sister's husband, just like the man she'd heard shouting from a cell down the hall a few days past. She remembers the words _rescue_ and _safe_ and _Miss._

She was naked and half-delirious when the SEAL slung her over his shoulders. On the way out she passed Saleem's body. Bloody. The American kicked him in the gut.

The helicopter blades beat the air and went around, around, around. She was dizzy. She was slipping. They put her on a gurney next to their rescued comrade. His left eye was swollen shut and his fingernails ripped from their beds, but he reached over to hold her hand. She did not know his name.

They went up, up, and she fell to the darkness.

…

It was bright. White: tile and bed sheets and walls and ceiling paneling. They reflected the stark lighting.

She thought of God.

The doctors listed her injuries with straight faces, but she knew when they turned away their expressions dissolved into pity. _You should have died_. It was what they wanted to say, but didn't. Wouldn't.

It was late September, they told her. Four months since the Damocles left Aqaba; a whole summer plus some that she'd lain in that cell with open wounds festering in the desert heat. Yet the blood tests had come back and the doctors read from her chart only nutrition deficiencies.

No infection, no diseases. Impossible, she said.

 _Improbable, they answered._

And so she thought of God, and second chances. Or third, fourth, tenth chances, really, because there were the missions before Somalia—the bullets she'd dived in front of, the slim odds of success she'd beaten over and over again even when she sought to do the opposite. Miracles, her sister would have called them, but Ziva did not know what she believed. She was more inclined to agree with her brother.

But yet…

The days passed—weeks? months?—and she healed. Young bodies, after all, stitch themselves back together so well. Her limbs were heavy with bandages and the weight of years, but she eventually could stand from bed. With help, even walk down the hallway.

Sometimes she made it to the waiting room, and there were people and nowhere to hide. They looked. Stared. She wondered what they saw, if they could ever imagine.

So long confined to a blank hospital room and yet nothing to do. There was a TV, but she did not care about the sitcoms or the sports and especially not the news. It was the same. Always the same. In those months she began to read again.

A kind nurse named Emily brought her favorites from the library. Ziva read quickly, for she could any longer be alone with her thoughts.

And yet, in the end she found it defeated the purpose, because she began to think about the characters and their actions, their decisions, their lives… and inevitably, it all came back to her own.

She always found it empty.

All of the years she'd lived, all of the countries she visited. She'd traversed the globe and met people of every sort. By these standards she would have lived a full life. A rich life. She would look back now and remember in vibrant color all that she'd experienced. It would be fulfilling.

Instead, there was only a blur of loneliness and longing. She'd seen the world from inside herself and experienced nothing.

And then Saleem had come along, with his men and his knives and his fists that cracked her ribs and slowly, painfully, extracted her from where she had hidden herself within. Newly freed and rubbed raw, she saw now what her life was. What she left behind. What it would mean if she'd died in the desert, or died today.

 _Nothing. Absolutely nothing._

Eighty-seven years of suffering, and for what?

…

So she vowed to live before she died.

She was not one for planning— _impulsive,_ so many had called her—and when the doctors discharged her she had only the skeleton of an idea. It was enough, though. Months after she'd entered she left the hospital with donated clothes on her back and the first installment of a hefty Mossad pension in her pocket. She rented a car, red, and drove until the Capital was in her rearview mirror. Her nieces never even knew she was there.

She did not know how long it would take to feel that she'd experienced _._ That she'd contributed. That she was _fulfilled._ She knew, however, that she would not stop until there was something behind her besides the long line of lives she'd taken.

…

 _Finally, the counter. She opens her mouth to order a cup of Jasmine tea, to go, please. Always to go. She rarely stays. She opens her wallet and pays in cash, then steps aside. The man from behind her is at the counter, now. She does not bother looking beyond his suit._

…

A few weeks in Maryland turned into a few months in Delaware. She rented an apartment near the ocean and spent her days in coffee shops, on boardwalks, in bookstores. Watching. She thought a lot of her mother, and Sunday mornings.

She surrounded herself with people—the young, the old, the indistinguishable—but did not interact. Instead, she studied them like an alien. It had been a long time since she belonged to the real world.

She got tired of Delaware and moved north, spending one week in some cities and four months in others. Maine welcomed her just as autumn fell. Sometimes, there was the desire to claim a new Michael Rivkin, or two, or four. She fought it and gave in only once, around New Hampshire. He was a businessman, she thought. She would not remember his name.

She rented an apartment and took dance lessons in Pennsylvania. Ballet. Her body remembered the motions— _one, two, three; one, pirouette._ She thought more of her mother, who had been such a graceful dancer once upon a time… so proud to see her daughter in a leotard.

In Ohio she learned the piano, again an old skill that had been mostly lost. Her teacher was a young woman with bright eyes and a passion Ziva envied. She swayed back and forth on the bench when she played. Feeling, deeply. Ballet came back easier than reading music, and for months Ziva stumbled, but she refused to leave until Für Elise floated out from beneath her fingertips. When it finally did, she swayed. Her teacher seemed proud, and she left the next morning.

Following her pattern she took art lessons in Michigan and Indiana. She coated canvas after canvas in vibrant color—abstracts, mostly—and though she was not the best artist her instructor, a man with paint on his glasses and hair to his shoulders, seemed impressed by her pieces.

 _There is so much emotion in this one,_ he told her. _I can feel the suffering, Ziva._

Next was Chicago, and she stayed only long enough to paint a mural on a crumbling downtown wall.

Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota saw her tired of the fine arts. Instead, she helped build houses. Her muscles strained and her body ached and sweat dripped down her brow but they finished the houses before winter fell. The families, parents with old eyes that may not have been due to age, were grateful.

In North Dakota she rode horses. They were not her uncle's and it was not Haifa, but it felt freeing, in a way.

In the Mountain states she hiked. Bought a tent. Visited the parks.

Seattle was her move back to civilization. She rented an apartment and found a flyer at the supermarket. _Translators needed._ In the next five months she translated legal papers for so many new immigrants.

From Seattle to south San Francisco. Her apartment was in Chinatown this time, and she learned a new language.

Next, Albuquerque. She did as she did in the Northwest.

She travelled back east, now, bouncing around until she hit New Orleans. There, she worked with the children. So many came from broken families, from parents whose faces had yet to begin to age. So many labeled _mistake._ She read them stories, sometimes. To one little girl she taught the piano on a crooked, untuned set of keys. She thought of Little Ziva and of what she herself would never have. Perhaps that too had been fated.

Either way, she felt the absence sharply in Louisiana.

Through the South, now, but she never stayed long. A week here, a month there, doing as she had in the rest of the country. Fatigue, however, followed closely behind her in the rearview mirror. With every move it gained.

It wasn't fulfillment that she felt, now, but maybe that had been too high of a goal. Perhaps this was enough.

She was in Richmond when she made the call. A disposable cell phone and a number with too many digits—extension after extension. So many decades operating in the underbelly of society had taught her where to look for this particular service.

They scheduled the appointment for two weeks later in Ottawa. _Injection,_ she requested. Supposedly, it was the best way. The painless way. _Payment? Cash._ The boy stood at the edge of the rooftop, and looked down at where he'd land.

On her way north she visited DC a last time. They were distant but they were family, and she wanted to say goodbye.

Before her nieces', she stopped at a coffee shop.

…

 _There is her tea, piping hot in a to-go cup from the counter to her hand. The man behind her has finished ordering now, and is next to her. She removes her lid, waves the steam. Opens a sugar packet, pours in exactly a third. Stirs. She thinks a lot about lasts. Her last cell phone sits heavy in her pocket. She puts the lid back on. Turns. Bumps elbows with someone._

 _Looks up._

…

Her soul is one hundred years old when she meets him, and it is as she never could have imagined.

That last cup of tea lays discarded on the tile floor. Everything is discarded but him—his eyes. He opens his mouth but she does not think he says anything, and if he does, she cannot hear it over her heart in her chest, her blood in her ears. Thumping, rushing, and _oh, she's moving._

Moving, finally, after all these years. She is thawed, catapulted, shaken awake with an emerald-green jolt. She forgets to breathe.

There is clapping and whistling and hollering from somewhere around them but Ziva does not hear. She doesn't think he does either. She can only stare as she feels decade upon decade of doubt and cynical disbelief lift, all at once, from her shoulders and dissolve into thin air.

She knows, now. She understands.

Without the weight to hold her down she thinks she should float away but she doesn't. Instead of up, she moves forward. He too takes a step, and they meet in the middle.

Two people have never held one another so tightly.

…

His name is Tony—An American, like her sister's husband. He used to be a cop. They sit together at a table by the window and unfold their stories in fragile, breathless tones.

With a radiant smile he says he was born on Long Island. _A businessman and his free-spirit of a wife._ He, too, had lost his mother early, though it was to disease and not a drunk driver. His home was a Military Academy and summer camps, then. She thinks of their fathers, and tries not to draw the parallels.

From east-coast boarding schools to a dorm in Columbus. She remembers Ohio—eight, nine years ago?—and thinks of Beethoven. He thinks of basketball and Spring Break and a little boy in a house fire that made him reconsider.

But first, a woman named Wendy.

"Who is Wendy?" she asks.

"We were young."

He tells her only that they had not been careful, and her still-paused body had swelled with a life that nine months later was placed, four pounds two ounces, in Tony's trembling arms. A little boy. Jacob, after his mother's father.

There was an arrangement, Tony told her, and it was never ideal but it worked, for a while, but his son had only just said his first sentence when Wendy's body awoke and the arrangement crumpled to pieces between their fingers. Tony cannot remember the man's name, and he does not care to.

They move cross-country and take Jacob with them. Tony sees his son once a year after that, if he's lucky. Only when the boy is old enough to move out and get a job back on the East Coast does he starts to see his father more often.

"He died four years ago. A stroke. Seventy-something years, I think."

Ziva mourns the loss as her own.

A cop, then. The Police Academy then Peoria then Philly then Baltimore—the daily grind in so many cities, but he rose quickly through each department. Soon he was the lead homicide investigator. She listens to him describe it and her heart twists. _Senseless violence,_ he tells her. _You wouldn't believe the things I've seen._

She stays silent.

He tells her that he searched for her in every one of those cities, and every day expected to find her. A storefront window, a courtroom, a car next to him at a red light, in the field on a case. Eventually, it progressed, regressed—he searched in melancholy bars, booming clubs, at the bottom of a glass and between sweaty, morning-after sheets. He knows he does not need to explain any of this to her further.

She realizes, as he continues to weave his tale, that he is like Tali. A romantic at the core.

He says he's lived in Washington for forty years. For many of those years he was a government cop, apparently, investigating crimes for the Navy.

"There's only so much of that you can take, though," he muses with a sad smile— _always a smile—_ over his now-cold cup of coffee, "before it all just starts looking pointless."

"Then what did you do?" They are seated, the air is still and the café calm, but her heart races, furiously.

He shrugs. "Some things here and there." He does not specify and she does not ask. "Somehow I ended up back at school. Though there was a lot less beer-pong and wet t-shirt contests that time around."

A coy smile plays at her lips. "No fraternities?"

"Oh yeah, because a seventy-something year old guy would've fit right back in the frat scene." He frowns, and the joking mood ebbs. "There was still a lot of sex, though."

She looks down at the table. "Sometimes… it is the only way."

"It never solved anything."

"No," she agrees.

"Anyway, I teach now. Undergrad film studies at Georgetown."

She cocks an eyebrow. "You are a movie buff."

"Oh, Miss Da _veed,_ you have no idea."

He tells her the names of his favorites, then, with quotes and impressions to go along with each. She listens with attentive ears and, when she admits she's seen very few, agrees to watch them all with him. His eyes sparkle, and she thinks hers do, too.

And, just like that, it is her turn. He asks her her story and for the first time she does not hesitate, does not hide, does not lie. She pours her existence into the warm air between them and accepts.

 _I was eight years old when my mother…_

…

The coffee shop closes at nightfall, and after nine hours they stand from their table by the window. Neither felt the time.

His apartment is neat, clean, modern, and he hangs her coat in a closet by the doorway. She utters a thank you, and her eyes fall on the piano in the corner. It is black, sleek, dustless. She moves.

"You play?" she asks.

"Not very well."

The first few notes of _Für Elise._ "I will teach you, hmm?"

He shows her the kitchen, the dining room, the bedroom. _The bedroom._ Something within her stirs.

"Are you hungry? We kinda missed dinner."

"Mmm," she hums distractedly.

"You like pizza?"

"I like everything."

"Is pepperoni okay, or…?"

She nods her head. "I do not keep kosher."

The corner of his mouth tugs upwards. "Well, you're easy."

"I have learned to… run with it."

"Roll with it?"

"Yes, that."

He goes to make the call, and suddenly the cell phone feels heavy in her pocket with the only thing she had not told him.

Before he can dial a number their eyes catch from the threshold of his bedroom. For the first time since they met, they stand together in silence. The eyes speak. She sees in his a century of futile searching and emotional isolation; a life spent chasing monsters only to realize he'd been chasing his own tail. The fear, the loneliness, the longing, the _relief._ The desire. Or was that her eyes, reflected back in his?

They drift closer, closer, closer, until…

Their eyes are closed now, because to have them open would distract from how it felt to have their mouths united, their hands in each other's hair, their warm skin on warm skin. The passion borders on desperation like neither have ever felt before. It is furious and longing and they are insatiable with a century's worth of thirst for _this._ They drink in the connection—parched, disbelieving.

Their clothes pool on the ground and in the lamplight there is only scars and sweat on their skin. She discovers his as he discovers hers, with kisses and brushes of teasing, willowy fingers. She plants her lips on bullet wounds and caresses streaks of red; on her body she feels him do the same. If he is shocked by the sheer number he says nothing—she has told him about Africa. Their skin is slick and they explore. Hungrily.

She cannot describe how it feels. She tries to think of words—labels, categories—so that later she can look back and remember, exactly. But for every form of expression in every language that she knows, for a century's worth of vocabulary, she can think of nothing. Nothing. And that is how she knows she will remember.

He is not Michael Rivkin, or Malachi Ben-Gidon. He is not any other of the hundreds of men whose bodies she used as substitutes. He is not empty comfort.

He is Tony DiNozzo, and he is her soulmate.

…

They do not move from their bed. They lie in the sheets long after they've had their fill of each other's bodies and hours pass without notice. The sky lightens, lightens, turns a pale purple then orange as the sun peaks out above the tree line. The light pours in, and they are still.

Two bodies atop the sheets, naked, lying on their sides facing one another. Two heads are bowed with brows rested together, connected. Four legs intertwine and hands find a home on each other's hips. Their eyes are closed. It is soft, reverent. They drift in and out of sleep.

That night teaches Ziva a foreign concept—how painful it can be to love another. Not in the way she expects, for it had been difficult and costly to love her father; no, this is something different altogether. Tony is centimeters from her, and their bodies touch in so many ways, yet she is not satisfied. A lifetime of loneliness is not so easily undone, and she yearns to be closer with every fiber of being. Her stomach twists, her chest aches, and her throat has this lump that makes her jaw hurt and lungs burn for air. Every nerve waits for his touch.

She has suffered so many years from an absence she could not understand—and now in her arms is the cure she had given up on even existing and she cannot get enough. The restraint hurts.

He wakes, then, with the sunlight streaming through the windows and onto their messy hair, and he looks up. She watches him remember, and witnesses that same craving spill into his emerald eyes.

They give in again, completely, and it is softer this time. They whisper, they caress, they savor. On top of the sheets they learn each other in the most intimate of ways, and neither shies away. They met less than a day ago, but are not strangers.

"We should probably get up," she murmurs into his neck once they have finished. Her fingers twist lazily in his hair.

"Yeah, we should," he admits in a low breath. She wonders on how quickly and effortlessly _I_ became _we._

Her clothes from yesterday lay wrinkled on the floor with his, so she wears a light blue dress shirt from his closet. They move as one to the kitchen for breakfast.

She leans against the countertop, studying him as he takes out a waffle-maker. "You know, we never did order that pizza."

"For lunch, then," he compromises, "or dinner, if you want." And there is something warm in her chest at those words, or rather the assumption that they make—that she will be here for lunch, for dinner, for another night. For every night. The warmth spreads upward to her sex-flushed cheeks and downward to her stomach and her unpainted toes.

There is ringing then, and she does not realize it is for her until Tony glances at her with raised eyebrows. _Oh._ She goes back to the bedroom and fishes the phone from the pile of clothes on the floor and out of dazed habit answers with _shalom._

Logically she knew who it was—who else would be calling her?—but the voice comes through the other end and she freezes in her tracks on the way back to the kitchen. Her throat is dry.

"I am sorry, there has been a change of plans. I will no longer require your services." The phone flips shut and she stands planted in his living room as it hits her. How close she was. How she very nearly… She almost didn't stop for that cup of tea…

"Hey." He plies her white fingers from their death grip around the phone. "Who was that?"

She takes a breath, blinking, moving again. She sets the phone on the mantle. "A friend."

"You've been wandering cross-country for thirteen years, Ziva. I don't believe you." Even when he challenges her it is gentle.

And oh, why is it suddenly so easy to speak the truth?

"A man." She stares beyond him. "I had been… talking to him, about something."

His thumb rubs the back of her hand and coaches her to continue.

"We had an appointment for this morning. He was going to… help me."

She hears him swallow. "Help you how?"

She does not want to speak the words. She does not want to admit. She had not wanted to become him, that boy on the rooftop, ready to take the final step forward. If she never said it then maybe it could hide in her heart forever, no one had to know, she didn't need to… but this was _Tony._ It was Tony, and she had to.

"He was going to help me die."

She wonders if those are tears in his eyes and when he pulls her tightly to his chest she decides that yes, they are tears. Her own eyes squeeze shut against tears of her own that leak out and absorb into his shirt. She balls up the cloth in her fists as her mouth crumples and her shoulders fall and she shakes with the _almost_ s. He rests his chin atop her head and his silent pain, _her_ pain, falls as droplets into her hair. It is comfort as she has never known.

How many years since she cried? How many decades? It comes out now as she clings to him, and him to her.

"I'm so sorry I kept you waiting so long," he says after she goes still in his arms. Taking a breath, she pulls back. She wants to see his eyes.

Her fingers trace his jaw, his brow, his cheekbone. "And I you."

"Maybe this was planned," he suggests, sweeping a loose curl behind her ear. "Maybe we always ended up in that coffee shop."

She gives a watery smile. "You are like my sister."

"Yeah?"

"A romantic."

He smirks. "And you're the opposite, huh?"

"Well, perhaps now I am not," she muses, wiping her eyes. "But we are still opposite in many other ways."

"I'm pretty sure there's a saying about that."

"Yes," she agrees. "We are the proof, I suppose."

"The cop and the assassin."

Her face darkens, falling. "I would prefer if you did not…"

"Right. Sorry."

"There is… there is much that I regret, Tony."

He rubs his hand up and down against the side of her shoulder. "Hey, I've got my regrets too. Don't worry. We've got a long time to make up for them." And she is not sure who starts it, but somehow without words their lips meet in the middle. They sink.

The smell of something burning breaks them apart and she watches with a smile, her arms folded over her stomach, as he hurries to save their breakfast. She follows after him to help set out plates on the countertop; the cellphone lies on the mantle, forgotten.

"The first one usually doesn't turn out that well, anyway," he dismisses as he tosses the charred lump in the trash.

"Mhmm. This next one better be good, Tony. Your waffle-making reputation is on the line here."

"Oh, you just wait, Ziva. You'll eat those words."

She barks a laugh. "Prove it."

He does prove it, and she apologizes with a smirk. They eat breakfast at the table with banter still bouncing between them; it is new but so familiar.

…

It will look much like this, five years later. Different kitchen, different table, maybe. A two-story colonial instead of a one-bedroom apartment. There will be others there, as well—four instead of two. A high chair and a booster seat.

Ziva will tease Tony and their daughter will chime in between gulps of orange juice. Three years old, already thinking herself a grown up, she will laugh a raucous laugh that reminds her mother of someone long lost. Ziva will smile, happy that they chose the name Tali.

And then, of course, there is their son. They will call him Daniel, the male form of Tony's mother's name. Daniel Jacob. He will sit next to Ziva and tug on her wedding ring whenever she tries to put the cereal in his mouth. At this age he can only babble, but he imitates his father.

She will look up, over the table, and catch her husband's eyes. She smiles a lot after she meets him—only five years later will her eyes be winged with crows feet and her mouth with laughter lines. Every morning she will pluck a few grey hairs—her mother started getting them early, too—that she will blame on the worry of having children old enough to walk. It will always be a joke. Every morning, when she lifts Daniel from his crib and helps little Tali pick out a skirt, she will say a whispered prayer of thanks.

As she begins to do with Tony, she will eventually teach their children to play piano. Years later, she will start teaching others, then others more. It will become her job, and she will enjoy it. He will come home every day from teaching _his_ passion and they will greet one another with a kiss and a smile. Always a smile.

And when night falls, after they whisper soft _goodnights_ in their children's ears, they will fall together on their bed and lay silently, breathlessly, with legs intertwined and foreheads resting against each other. Sometimes they will wonder at the wasted years spent separate, searching, suffering. But together at the end of the day, feeling the warmth and each other's arms, it will always seem to make sense.

The sun sinks, rises, and at last time ticks on.

—

"And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love.

But the greatest of these is love."

 _1 Corinthians 13:13_

—


End file.
